


pas devant les enfants

by ladyvivien



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - Ian Fleming, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Backstory, Gen, and some non-canon backstory, mothers and sons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/705960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyvivien/pseuds/ladyvivien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Resurrection is a hobby that runs in the family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pas devant les enfants

Monique Delacroix is 19 when the Secret Intelligence Service, in the shape of a rather handsome Scotsman by the name of Andrew, approach her. She’s busy, she tells him, she doesn’t have time to play at espionage when she’s got a tutorial in the morning. She takes the drink, downs it in one, and leaves. 

After her final exam of the year, she goes back to her room and finds him lounging in her chair with a half-empty glass of her favourite brandy in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

“Now,” he says, “about that job offer.”

She was never patriotic, and whatever loyalty she had to Switzerland is shrugged off in favour of this new challenge. She spends the vacation proving her physical fitness - her brilliance is, even now, without question. She’s been able to shoot straight since she was ten years old, and she’s scrappy in a fight, refusing to back down no matter how much shorter she is than the hulking men they send to test her. 

Within a year of graduating, she’s one of their best and brightest. Within two years she and Andrew Bond are married, for no other reason than MI6’s disapproval of pre-marital sex and the fact that they happen to be terribly good at it. Her employer, a jowly man fond of his cognac who she knows by a letter, not a name, calls her into his office a week before the wedding to request that she stay on after she gets married. She blinks once, informs him that she’d had no intention of giving up work, thank you very much, and once they get back from the honeymoon she’s applying for a promotion. 

It takes a little longer than that before she gets her coveted 00 status - five years, long enough to convince them that she’s not planning on getting pregnant (long enough for her to start a rumour that she can’t). Andrew buys a bottle of obscenely expensive champagne and announces his intention of pouring it over her after they leave the little party M has thrown in her honour. She crisply informs him that it’s her celebration and if anyone is licking champagne off anyone else, it’s going to be her. 

It’s ten years as a trained killer before she starts to get restless. She wants to transfer to desk duty, to something more analytical, without looking like she can’t hack it, so the simplest thing to do seems to be to throw away her contraceptive pills and start propagating the Bond family line the way her stuffy in-laws want. 

The labour is long and agonising, the baby squalling, red and angry. She hates him for the first few months, this bundle of impulses and biological imperatives - eat, sleep, shit, cry. But when he smiles at her, properly smiles, for the first time, she finds herself looking into the big blue eyes and something inside her shifts. She isn’t the most hands-on mother in the world, but Andrew doesn’t seem to expect it - it’s a British thing, she suspects - and James doesn’t seem to need it. He’s an independent little sort, always testing the boundaries she sets, seeing how far he can go before she reins him in. Work keeps them busy, and if he’s perturbed by the fact that she alone out of all the mothers of the boys at his prep school has a job, he never mentions it. Then again, he has no idea what his parents actually do. 

The Service are generally very good at not arranging Andrew’s missions during school holidays, but there’s the inevitable overlap and she doesn’t think anything of it when she calls the school and tells James that she’s very sorry, darling, but Mummy and Daddy won’t be home until Thursday so he must be a very good boy for Kincaid. He doesn’t seem unduly concerned - he’s always liked the ghillie, and in any case he’s got a rugby match in ten minutes so he has to go loveyoubye. 

It’s the last time she speaks to her son. 

She’s always known they were living on borrowed time, that death would come for one or both of them eventually. She’s just glad James isn’t here as well. She lies in her hospital bed, recovering from her injuries and the news that she has been made a widow, and she knows perfectly well who is to blame. The organisation is based in Eastern Europe although its remit is scattershot, and she’s started to suspect that their main interests are in plaguing her and Andrew. There was a viciousness to this attack, as though it were a personal vendetta rather than a simple assassination.

Her choice is clear. There are some things she isn’t willing to risk.

“I can’t go back,” she tells Tanner, who sits at her bedside with a sympathetic gaze she can’t meet. He has a son himself, an adorable floppy-haired boy a few years younger than James, and it takes him a moment to understand what she means. “They’ll come after me again. And if they can track me down, they can hurt James and I won’t let them. Do you understand? I won’t let them.”

Two coffins are flown back to London, a phone call is made in Kincaid who in turn relays it to James, and she is taken to a safe house and given a new name. Then she asks them to send her as far away from Britain as possible because the thought of being in the same country as her darling boy and not being with him makes her chest constrict. It would have been easier, so much easier, if she had really died. 

She spends the next few decades drifting from country to country, heading up divisions with increasing prestige. She takes the news that they have recruited James straight from Oxford in her stride, not thinking about the implications. She has no idea what kind of man that naughty little boy has grown into, and she tells herself it’s better that way. She doesn’t return to England for any length of time until she leaves Hong Kong in a blaze of glory and takes her place behind the desk she’d stood in front of so many times in her career. 

And so, inevitably, she comes face to face with him. She’s confident enough that he won’t recognise her, not after all these years, not when she’s been reliably informed that he hasn’t looked at a picture of his parents since the funeral. If she is etched in his memory, she can only hope he assumes any echo of his mother that he sees in her is part of some misplaced complex. He, on the other hand, looks so much like his father that her heart hurts. 

He’s so eager to prove himself, so desperate for the promotion she’d wanted as badly once, but she makes him wait. He thinks she’s being cruel, that she doesn’t think he’s ready, that she doesn’t trust him, and the tenor of their conversations leave her wanting to laugh and cry. He lists all the others she’s promoted from his peer group, demands to know that if they can do it, why can’t he? He never slams the door behind him, but he would if he could get away with it. 

In the end, the only thing stopping her is the one thing she can’t permit, so she pushes sentiment aside and sends him out for his first kill. It’s messy but it gets the job done and whilst she picks up on every mistake, every sloppy move in their debrief, she prides herself in thinking that he gets his tenacity from her. 

She is married to a man who has no idea who she really is, who has never heard the name James Bond. She loves him, after a fashion. It’s a different kind of love from the burning passion she’d had for Andrew - they fucked like rabbits all over Skyfall Lodge, even before they started trying for a baby - but he’s solid and dependable and makes her feel like she’s real and not just a ghost. James is absurdly jealous of him, she can tell. The way he eyes their wedding photo on her desk in distaste, the discomfort when they return home late from the opera one night, tipsy and affectionate, to find him sprawled on their couch taking apart his gun. 

“What time do you call this?”, he mutters sulkily, and she makes some explanation to Robert and shakes with laughter as her son slinks off after accusing them of acting like teenagers. 

Despite their differences, despite the secrets she keeps from him, he adores her. He hates her, resents her, thinks her a fool, but he respects her and admires her and wants her to take notice of him all the same. It’s inevitable in retrospect that something should come along to shatter his illusions, to remind him that she had a life before he came along. To his credit, he never doubts her, not once, not even when everything goes to shit. He shows her his favourite toy proudly - Andrew’s old car - and she teases him and compliments it and never once mentioned that she fucked his father over the bonnet in Berlin once, or that there’s roughly a 67.35% chance he was conceived in the backseat (she calculated it once. Being dead, it turns out, leaves you a lot of time to do pointless sums). 

Kincaid recognises her on sight, but he’s wise enough to say nothing. He calls her by her new name with an ironic grimace, but he never once asks her why she did it, not even when they’re stumbling through the Scottish Highlands as she’s bleeding out. He does let her take the lead, though. She knows exactly where she’s going, after all. 

She remembers very little from the chapel to the hospital. She remembers Bond refusing to come in the ambulance, the walls she helped to build thirty years ago strengthening as he loses someone else. They’ll stand him in good stead as an agent, and that’s all she can allow herself to care about, even as she drifts in and out of consciousness.

When she wakes up properly, the déja vu nearly sends her swooning again. This time, Tanner looks delighted, not devastated, and she wonders if his father ever told him the truth about her. 

“Have you told Bond?” she croaks.

He shakes his head, hands her his mobile. “I thought I’d let you do the honours.” 

She hands it back to him. “He didn’t expect me to make it through the night. I think,” she says softly, “it would be better if I didn’t.”

Tanner looks lost.

“You know as well as I do that I’m not likely to see out the year in the Service. I’d rather he remember me as I was. It’s sentimental, I know, but...let’s just say I have my reasons. He got to say his goodbyes, after all.” Her voice breaks for the first time in thirty years, but her resolve remains. She leaves it to Tanner to arrange the details, curiously uninterested in what her new life is to hold. 

Three weeks later her will is read, and she steps into her new life.

**Author's Note:**

> The shadowy organisation responsible for Andrew Bond's death is SPECTRE, Bond's nemesis from the novels and the early films. The title translated from the French means 'not in front of the children.'
> 
> And for lovely visuals:
> 
> Andrew Bond: http://marshallmatlock.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/sean-connery-james-bond-aston-martin-mountains.jpg
> 
> Monique Delacroix Bond: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/10/13/1255449224710/Judi-Dench-in-1968.-001.jpg


End file.
